| ▲ | WarmWash 3 hours ago |
| The military budget is a jobs program that also keeps a (near bare minimum) level of industrial capacity afloat. Its why no politician left or right is really interested in cutting it. If you browse open contracts, you'll see they that they overwhelmingly buy rather banal things and spend comparatively little on the "killing people" parts. |
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| ▲ | malfist 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| What do you think NASA is? NASA is so expensive because it's a jobs program. There's no other reason for Boeing to have factories in so many states for building satellites. |
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| ▲ | WarmWash 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You're not wrong, and no one is turning down NASA contracts, but the scale isn't comparable. NASA buys mostly highly specialized parts that can be pretty narrow in scope and utility. OTOH the DoD will buy 150,000 aluminum water canteens, which is probably the only thing keeping the one decent job in Wagatah, Maine from closing. Which happens to be of only a handful of shops in the country with the tooling for this. Wagatah, of course, is not known for it's aerospace engineering. But thankfully water is pretty important for soldiers, and the new design is x% more efficient, so Wagatah gets another 5 years of work, the DoD gets to keep a domestic source of water canteens, and if NASA needs 5 space grade aluminum storage boxes, a company in Wagatah can make them. | |
| ▲ | pc86 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | OK so maybe they're both jobs programs, but .mil is bigger and employs more people (almost certainly at a lower per capita cost). | | |
| ▲ | Retric an hour ago | parent [-] | | > OK so maybe they're both jobs programs, but .mil is bigger and employs more people Which is a direct function of its budget not a function of what it does. > (almost certainly at a lower per capita cost). DoD is extremely expensive per job due to the longe term benefits, layers of bureaucracy, and sub contractors. |
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| ▲ | tclancy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Great. Can we change it to just be the non killing part for a few years until the bad project ideas fully die off? |
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| ▲ | Schiendelman 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | If anything, we've been letting the killing parts languish dangerously for decades - to the point where we may not be able to defend our allies in a serious conflict. | |
| ▲ | alberto467 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No it would obviously lose its purpose then. | | |
| ▲ | adrianN 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You could have a jobs program that builds infrastructure instead. | | |
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| ▲ | manoDev 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The military budget is how the US enforces Bretton Woods. The jobs part is just a nice side-effect of any govt. spending. |
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